


let the animal get away

by Bookshelf



Series: where nothing dwells but love [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Inspired by Poetry, Kinda, Love at First Sight, M/M, like a songfic but more pretentious, lots of eye imagery, vauge descriptions of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29317632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bookshelf/pseuds/Bookshelf
Summary: Magnets attract (whoosh), but they can also repel.Title and Excerpts from "Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light" by Richard Siken
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: where nothing dwells but love [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2174607
Kudos: 13





	let the animal get away

**_“Lovers do the looking while the strangers look away. It isn’t fair, the depth of my looking, the threat of my looking. It’s rude to shake a man visible and claim the results.”_ **

They don’t meet during the first crusade. Well, they do. They kill each other and each other and each other. At first they don’t realize, war is so messy, so quick. But eventually it’s hard not to recognize those eyes, hard to convince himself that his brain is making this up. Those eyes, unsurprised at death, reflecting his own weariness back at him. He recognizes himself in those eyes and feels the roiling boil of shame raveling his nerves. 

He turns his eyes away. 

He does not go back out in the morning, occupying himself by being a nuisance outside the captain’s tent. He does not return to battle in any of the days that follow, but he does not leave. The shore is a prison at his back. War and all her devils burn in front of him. Shame pounds away in his ears and he cannot understand how no one else hears it. There is more that happens. The important thing is, that when the shame leaves and all that is left is _grief, grief, grief_ and dead, dead bodies and the receding shore as the tsunami of guilt builds, those eyes that knew him are gone. As the wave crashes down and takes with it years, decades, centuries, he can only be glad to be spared a witness. 

**_“This side of his face, now this side of his face. His profile up against the tulips. I put down the brush and walked around the room. Even when I look away I am still looking.”_ **

One century passes, two. Nicolo has not made peace with what he has done, the guilt and the regret have never left, maybe never will, but he is no longer drowning. He helps, where he is able. More importantly, he learns, he unlearns. This is not the point of this story. It’s in a town set between sprawling green hills just east of the Caspian sea that Nicolo finds them again. He hadn’t been looking. Those first moments had been overwhelming even in memory, how could he invite those eyes to look at him again, when he is sure he’d fade to nothing if they did? 

But in those first few seconds, those eyes weren’t looking back, turned to something else, and Nicolo realized that he had also been deeply afraid. To never see these eyes again, brown and brown and captured in the sun’s warmth, would be like traveling the desert: no shade, no rest. Survivable, for Nicolo, but merciless and drained of all color. The seconds ended and the eyes were looking back. Even in the waxing autumn they were bright and Nicolo saw his own surprise, his own want, looking back. This time he makes sure not to turn away. 

Up close, unmarred by the frames of mud and blood, the eyes speak of _life, life, life_ and Nicolo never wants to stop looking. 

**_“He is inside his body and I am inside my body and it matters less and less. Shared face. Shared looking. A collaboration.”_ **

The eyes are attached to a man. His name is Yusuf. His every movement is sure and joyful, his smile possessing dancing warmth, his voice lavish with gentle humor. This is where their story starts.

* * *

  
**_“Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of see me, not through me. The selves, glaze on glaze, accumulating their moods and minutes.”_ **

Yusuf’s older sister always made fun of him for being hard headed and quick to anger, yet quick to forget and even quicker to forgive. The longest he was ever angry, before, was for three days when he was eleven, towards his father. He cannot remember why. Now, Yusuf has spent what feels like months in his anger, and the why surrounds him, crushes him, cracks beneath his feet with every careful step. As he rises, and falls, and rises, rises, rises he hopes to one day forget. 

Everyday is a cycle of hope and _anger, anger and anger, anger and the final despair_ , before hope bubbles through him again with his first breath. It’s at the peak of battle, when Yusuf is so encased in his anger as to be unstoppable that he sees him again. Across a rumbling sea of men he is a stone, stark in his stillness. It should be his eternity, his constant presence that makes him Yusuf’s rival. Perhaps if they had met at another time, another place, this would be the reason. Instead, it’s the man’s calm demeanor that unmoors Yusuf’s anger into a bottomless pit of fury. Killing him does nothing, but once Yusuf spat in his face and in his last few moments he saw a glimpse of rage in the other man’s eyes, saw his fists briefly shake. For once, instead of a miserable parade of despair and hope, Yusuf left his life with joy and came back laughing. If there is one thing he can do, amidst the nothing, amidst the everything, he can give this man his rage. 

But he doesn’t make it. This time, he meets the man’s eyes but is prevented from moving towards him by someone else’s sword in his gut. Pain, cruel in its distance. Yusuf holds the man’s gaze, feels the anger leave him, and feels the cold wave of despair take its place. The man takes his calm, calm eyes and turns away. 

For once, when Yusuf wakes, there is no hope in his first breath. He is left with _rage, rage, rage_ and he does not surface. The man does not come back. 

**_“Why build a room you can live in? Why build a shed for your fears? The life of the body is a nightmare.”_ **

****

He would have stayed there, would still be there, were it not for Basma and her children. As the fighting drew on and the dread grew deeper, more and more people fled the city. Basma stumbles on him outside of her door, where he had fallen earlier that morning, exhausted. She battered him awake and demanded that he escort her and the neighborhood children north to Halab. Yusuf did not offer any resistance. His body had become a husk, efficient but unfamiliar. It was not until the sun rose and set on a serene desert, broken by the hesitant laughter of children, that he began to come back to himself. 

He delivers them all, whole, to the doorstep of Basma’s sister. He drags his feet out of the city. Scrubs his eyes and soul with sand and feels years melting away, though the calendar says that only months have passed. Eventually, after years of drifting between the rivers of fighting and philosophy interwoven with small streams of peace, he goes home. His parents are gone, his uncle and brother have lost themselves in business and in war, but his sister is there, impossibly. Shahd is golden and steady in her age. She breaks down when she sees him. She does not ask questions. He helps her raise grandchildren, great grandchildren. He loses her too. He begins to drift once more, but now the flow of peace is steady in his heart.

**_“We tremble and I paint the trembling. I enlarge his mouth and everything went blurry, a forgery. It might as well be. And all my fingers turned to twigs. Inside himself he jumped a little. ”_ **

When he meets the man again, he sees his eyes first. Struck dumb once more across an ocean of bodies, this time made of children and grandmothers dancing festively rather than blood and screams and death. He feels surprise, curiosity. Nothing else. Has he forgiven? Certainly he has not forgotten. Determined, focusing on the steady calm of the man’s shoulders, the nothing in his face, his radiating stillness, Yusuf reaches for his rage. 

And does not find it. 

Annoyed, betrayed by his own mind, Yusuf imagines placing this burden at the man’s feet. Resurrecting the pain dulled by centuries and finding anger once more in the shadow of this man’s tranquility. He considers it. As the man approaches, Yusuf spares half of his mind to catalog the closest weapons and the other half to what languages the man might speak so Yusuf can properly insult him. Perhaps he would have followed through. Almost certainly would have chased this man and his own destruction far into the next eternity. 

But the man stops, breaking eye contact for a few breathless moments, and helps a grandmother who has fallen to her feet. He smiles at her, says something and waves his hands. As she walks away, his eyes snap back to Yusuf’s, and Yusuf sees a fear, dissipating from one moment to the next. 

**_“It was too much to bear. I put down the brush and looked at my hands. I turned off the headlights of my looking and let the animal get away.”_ **

The man’s name is Nicolo. His face holds expressions as the night holds stars, changing so slightly from one moment to the next that it is unnoticeable to the unstudied. But for his favorite students, he blazes, fleetingly, if they know when to look.

**Author's Note:**

> this started as me being annoyed at the general lack of Brown Eyes appreciation in the world and turned into something entirely different. namely, projecting my own experiences with anger, and my inability to feel it, onto joe. it's called coping.


End file.
